Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: AutoFormat within Form Fields.

AutoFormat within Form Fields

Mary was having a problem getting AutoFormat As You Type to convert "straight quotes" to "smart quotes" within the fields of protected forms.

Unfortunately, this seems to be one of the vagaries of working with Word. Quite a number of Word's features won't work in the fields of a protected form; AutoFormat As You Type is just one of them. Why the Word designers set things up this way is one of the great mysteries of the universe.

The only possible workaround would be to write some sort of OnExit macro that is triggered when the form's user moves from one form field to another. The macro could examine the contents of the form field and change any straight quotes to curly quotes. This, of course, is not an ideal workaround, since you might not want all quotes converted, which means the parsing rules can get rather complex.

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(Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.)
This tip (10472) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: AutoFormat within Form Fields.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is 9 - 8?

2017-02-02 15:31:31

John

I have a fill-in form that allows data to be added to certain fields. The data entered needs to be between a lower and higher number for it to be acceptable. Is there a way to return and message telling the person entering the form that the number entered is out of the range?